Telford The Place Thursday March 29th

One of the weird things about being on tour is that you tend to exist in a sort of bubble, and to a large extent the events of the outside world pass you by, unless it’s something totally cataclysmic like the death of a world leader, Newcastle United losing at home or an imminent national shortage of chocolate. A couple of days ago we started to hear about the possibility of a fuel tanker driver’s strike and the fact that panic buying had started as the result of an ill-considered phrase by a government suit ( actually, I’m amazed anyone managed to filter one single statement out of the constant stream of effluent which emanates from the corridors of power, but there you go ). Today we actually saw a little bit of this panic buying and suddenly we realise that it could have a very real impact on the tour. On top of the bus problem and the farrago with the projectors, I’m beginning to wonder if those good old Rock Gods are trying to test our mettle. We can do a LITTLE bit of legislating for potential poo, but if the whole country goes mad we’re screwed, to be honest. We try and put this out of our minds as we pull up at The Place in Telford….we’ve got enough to deal with during the day, and there’s not much we can do about it all anyway. We played here for the first time on the last tour, and it was a great night, so we’re hoping for something similar today. Rachel and Gary, the house crew, are really nice, friendly folks as well, so there’s a pretty mellow atmosphere onstage today. When it’s going like this it’s a great job to do….you’re with a good bunch of blokes, all of whom you can totally depend on, and the banter’s great. We’re not making widgets in a factory or staring at the same view out of an office window every day, and although there’s by definition some uniformity to the days, you genuinely don’t know what to expect . There’s a downside, of course….no company pension plan, private medical insurance, sick pay or weekends off, and it IS bloody hard work, but there’s an amazing sense of achievement when you’ve carted all these cases of gear into a venue, connected miles of cable, built speaker stacks, lined up projectors, plugged in instruments and got everything working, especially when you see the audience reaction at the end of the night. It’s even better when you get a shower afterwards then jump on the bus for a couple of beers and a bit of a laugh before climbing into your bunk and being rocked to sleep by the rhythm of the road. No such luck for us yet, of course, and so it’s another post-midnight hotel check-in, usually being done by some poor sap who speaks English as a third or even fourth language. Which leads me neatly on to tonight’s crew meal. As everyone else was still doing something, I decided to head into Telford and get the grub for the boys. Armed with a list ( three pie and chips, two sausage and chips, one fish and chips, one curry sauce….none of this healthy rabbit food cack for THESE boys ! ) I walked up to the main street, which actually looked as if it had been lifted piecemeal from downtown Baghdad….smashed concrete, haphazard holes and an air of general destruction were everywhere. All the shops on either side of the road were shut too, and the streets were deserted; for a moment I wondered if there’d been some terrorist outrage that had somehow passed us by. I swiftly discounted this idea, though….Telford already looks like a bomb’s hit much of it, so even the most desperate Al Qaeda cell would pass it up as a waste of time as a target. No, it was just the usual work of the great British Town Planners, so I picked my way through the rubble until I saw a little shop with a Pukka Pies sign outside. In the same way as the kite mark or the Queen’s “ by Royal Appointment “ denote quality, a Pukka Pies sign is a guarantee of excellence, so I headed inside, to be welcomed by a young man of indeterminate but distinctly foreign origin. I duly handed him my order. A straight enough undertaking for a fish and chip shop, you’d have thought, but no. You would have thought I had asked him to decipher the Rosetta Stone or work out the square root of two million, two hundred and thirty – seven judging by the furrowed brow, constant frustrated puffing out of the cheeks and frenzied scribbling on his little notepad. After ( and I’m not exaggerating ) about five minutes of this, he says “ so that’s three pies, a fish, curry sauce and six chips, yes ?”I nodded assent, at which point he began to tell me he’d charge me x pounds for the chips, y quid for the pies and z wonga for the fish and sausages, but that as it was a big order he’d give me a discount of…..at this point the frenzied scribbling started again….fifty pence. Slightly puzzled by this unasked – for largesse and his frankly mental way of breaking the order down, I thanked him and handed over the requisite funds. Now, call me old fashioned, but by definition a fish and chip shop is the very epitome of fast food. Not here, though. People of Britain, should you ever find yourself in Telford and gripped by a sudden and unquenchable desire for an infusion of lard, do yourselves a favour and do NOT go the Fish Inn on the High Street. This is NOT fast food. This is slow food. Very slow food. Tectonic plate – slow food. Having finally mastered the apparent complexity of my order, he finally placed the fish and chips in the fryer. “ Well, at least it’s fresh “ I thought, grasping for a redeeming feature. It began to dawn on me, though, that if he was just starting to cook it now, I wasn’t going to get back to the theatre until perilously close to showtime, so I asked him
( quite politely, as it happens ) if there was any way we could speed things up a bit. Wrong move. It just panicked him into some odd jerky little movements, as he turned first to the fryer, then the counter and finally the hotplate, then back again,
clearly unsure which activity to afford priority to, finally looking at me with lost, pleading eyes. “ Errr….just do your best, then “ I muttered. Too late….the poor kid was going into a flat spin, only made worse by the arrival on the scene of another young man of similar foreign extraction, who started doing odd things with the chip fryer basket whilst babbling in his mother tongue to the fraught youngster who, it slowly became clear, was actually the manager of this fine establishment. Things were rapidly going totally postal, and the expression on the face of the next customer who came in was all I needed to confirm that it wasn’t just me…they really WERE having a meltdown. I looked at my watch to see if it was still feasible to get back to the theatre in time, but he must have seen me, and interpreted it as the actions of an unhappy customer, as he barked something to his pal in a strangled voice and then started flinging chips out of the fryer and into the drainer. At least it looked like things were moving along, but then he did this really weird thing. He put a sort of household plastic bowl on the counter with a sheet of greaseproof paper in it, and I thought “ Hang on…surely he’s not going to put all of the food in these ? ” He didn’t. What he did was get the chips from the drainer, put a portion into the plastic bowl, and then tipped the portion into a Styrofoam container with another piece of greaseproof paper, which was standing on the counter next to the bowl. He repeated this process with Every. Single. Item. On. My. Order. Several aeons later, he’d managed to get everything into bags and thrust them at me with a triumphant smile on his sweating, flushed face. “ Surely he’s not going to say it “ I thought….and then he said it. “ Thank you for your custom, sir ! Please do come in again ! “. I smiled grimly and bit back the obvious “ not as long as my arse points downwards “ retort before hurrying out and back to The Place. The final irony was that as I dashed out I’d seen a sign on the window saying “Under New Management ! We pride ourselves on our excellent food and speed of service ! “ Well, if they’re the new management, I foresee another “ To Let “ sign going up in Telford in the not too distant future…..At least the food WAS good, but there’s nothing worse than having to bolt grub down as showtime’s looming. Anyway, that’s the story of dinner…!! Oh, did I mention we did a gig tonight ? I didn’t ? Well, we had a gig tonight. It was great. Best audience of the tour so far, in fact. You know how they go by now ! It only remains to leave you with today’s thought, which comes from M’boto Kadogo, also known as the Wise Old Man…..” He who can outrun the mountain leopard must be f*****g fast on his feet “….